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 of Solomon ( 975), the northern, called the Kingdom of Israel, was conquered by the Assyrians of Nineveh ( 722), who carried off many thousand of the people into captivity. Little is known of their fate. By some they are supposed to have been carried to India, by others to Tartary: 'what became of all the Israelites of the ten tribes,' is still a question with historians. The southern kingdom, called the kingdom of Judah, retained its independence till 588, when it was invaded and subdued by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, who destroyed Jerusalem, and carried away a great number of the principal Jews into captivity at Babylon. On the subversion of the Babylonian dominion by Cyrus, seventy years afterwards, the captives, to the number of 42,360, were permitted to return to their own land, and rebuild Jerusalem. At this period, the whole of Palestine merged in the growing Persian empire.

That large extent of level country situated between and on the banks of the two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, was in the earliest antiquity, the seat of a Semitic population living under an organized government. Of the cities, the most important ultimately were Babylon, built, by Nimrod, ( 2217); and Nineveh (called Ninos by the Greeks), built either by Asshur or Nimrod about the same time, but afterwards rebuilt and enlarged, according to ancient tradition, by a great king, Ninus, ( 1230). With these two cities as capitals, the country divided itself into two corresponding parts or kingdoms—the kingdom of Assyria proper, including, besides part of Mesopotamia, the country to the right of the Tigris as far as Mount Zagros; and the kingdom of Babylonia, including the western part of Mesopotamia, together with the country to the left of the Euphrates as far as Syria proper. The two kingdoms, however, are often included under the joint name of Assyria; a word which, as well as the shorter form Syria, was often employed by the ancient Greek writers to designate the whole region lying along the courses of the two great rivers from the Black Sea to the northern angle of the Persian Gulf.

Although Babylon was according to Scripture, the earlier of the two powers, yet the Assyrians of Nineveh attained such strength under their hero Ninus, as to reduce the Babylonians to a species of dependence. Under Ninus, and his wife and successor the great conqueress Semiramis, says ancient mythical history, the city of the Tigris extended its dominions far and wide, from Egypt to the border of India. This empire, known in the common chronologies by the name of 'The Assyrian Empire,' lasted, according to the usual accounts, five or six centuries, during which it was governed, in the absolute Oriental manner, by the successors of Ninus and Semiramis. Of these several are mentioned in Scripture—Phul, the contemporary of Menahem, king of Israel ( 761), Tiglath Pileser ( 730), both of whom were mixed up with the affairs of Israel and Judah; Salmanassar, cotemporary with Hezekiah, king of Judah, and Hoseah, king of Israel, by whom it was that Samaria was taken ( 722), and the Israelites led into captivity ( 722); and Sennacherib, or Sanherib ( 714), who attacked Egypt, and whose fruitless invasion of Judah forms the subject of the striking narrative in the 18th and 19th chapters of the second book of Kings. The last of the great line of the Assyrian kings of Nineveh